A Science of the Singular
The Interactional View Comes of Age
Introduction
Further confirmation of the radical new view of nature opened up by the revolution in ideas we have been exploring in the past two posts, and indeed throughout the pages of Change, has now come from a new and unexpected direction: the latest advances in quantum physics.
Most of the scientific revolution we have been describing and its interactional view of nature emerged mainly from work in the biological sciences. Now physics seems to be catching up.
—The Editors
A Science of the Singular:
The Interactional View Comes of Age
“But this is what science is all about: exploring new ways of conceptualizing the world. At times, radically new. It is the capacity to constantly call our concepts into question. The visionary force of a rebellious, critical spirit, capable of modifying its own conceptual basis, capable of redesigning our world from scratch. …We are asked to accept that reality may be profoundly other than we had imagined: to look into the abyss, without fear of sinking into the unfathomable.”
—Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland
A Man for All Seasons
Sometime in the early 1950s, Peggy Ashcroft (later Dame Peggy Ashcroft) starred on London’s West End stage in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, playing opposite a gifted young actor named George Gorelik, who co-starred in the title role. Gorelik, holding the much-coveted Equity card of the British Actors Equity Association as it then was, was also a talented professional singer. But his real passion and greatest creative gift as a performer was as an outstanding classical guitarist.
In fact, Gorelik had mastered the notoriously difficult harp guitar while the protégé in London of the legendary émigré Russian guitar master from St Petersburg, the polymath Dr Boris A. Perott, M.D., Ph.D., L.M.S.S.A., Arch.D., who was also a practicing surgeon who spoke no fewer than eighteen languages, was founder of the Philharmonic Society of Guitarists, who received a gold watch from Czar Nicholas II after his first performance before the Russian Imperial Court, and who, incidentally, is widely known as having been Julian Bream’s first guitar teacher.
However, Dr Perott passed on the mantle of succession, his prized harp guitar, not to Bream or to any of his many other distinguished pupils, but, as the inscription reads (in Russian), “To my young and talented pupil George Gorelik from a strict teacher, Dr Perott, 1950.” He was only twenty-four.
George Gorelik (1926–2012) was then a fairly recent Byelorussian émigré to London. He was born in the little hamlet of Sienno (now Syenna) near Liubča in what is now Belarus, but which at the time was still in the Nowogrodek region of the Second Polish Republic and was later in Novogrudsky Uyezd in Grodno Province, Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic by the time he emigrated to Great Britain (still holding a Polish passport), going first to Scotland, and from there to London.
George met his wife Peggy in London and together they eventually emigrated to Canada where he became a naturalized Canadian citizen. Far more than just an outstanding guitarist, Gorelik, who became the first full-time employee of the Certified General Accountants Association of British Columbia in the 1950s and its President in 1976, was a distinguished economist and accountant who played a pivotal role in leading international working groups on the integration of multi-national accounting standards. He was honoured by his adopted country’s accounting profession as one of Canada’s top 100 accountants of the century.
After completing his PhD in 1970 at the University of California at Berkeley where he taught for a time as an Assistant Professor, he returned to the University of British Columbia where he had previously obtained his CGA certification and MBA from the Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration, his connection to UBC—first as a student and then as a professor—eventually spanning some thirty years.
Prof. Gorelik was the recipient of numerous academic and professional awards in the multiple fields in which he shone, for he was a prodigious polymath, albeit one who wore his learning lightly. Indeed he was both one of the most brilliant and and one of the most modest men I have ever had the privilege to know.
Though his work ranged over many fields, when Prof. Gorelik and I first met in July of 1984 he introduced himself simply as an academic working in the field of organizational science.
In point of fact, Professor Gorelik, modest to a fault if anyone ever was, by then was already a highly accomplished and original cybernetician and systems theorist in his own right and a leading international expert in the field of organizational science, which was his great lifelong intellectual passion.
Fluent in Russian as well as in Polish, Belarusian, English, and a number of other languages, Prof. Gorelik had been, moreover, for many years, the leading Western authority on the remarkable and epoch-making (or at least epoch-marking) Russian organizational science of Tektology (from the Greek tekton, meaning builder).
By 1987, Prof. Gorelik had joined our own scientific research team based in London and Oxford, and over the next couple of years he would introduce me, and all of us at Interchange Research, to this remarkable body of scientific work.
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Bogdanov and Tektology
Tektology was a daringly ambitious “proto-cybernetics,” as it has frequently been called in the scientific literature, though I have long been vocal in disputing the need for the “proto-”. For Tektology, with its origins going back well before 1912, was simply, in point of fact, the oldest fully-fledged modern science of cybernetics avant la lettre, likewise embodying a radical and quintessentially cybernetic metaphysics and cosmology, along with an epistemology clearly recognizable as an early version of the new epistemology that I have described in detail in Catching Up With the Past.
The brainchild of the Byelorussian genius Dr Alexander Malinovskii (1873–1928), this extraordinary science was developed and published mainly between 1912 and 1928, the year of Malinovskii’s death. Malinovskii was a prominent Russian philosopher, physician, psychiatrist, sociologist, economist, novelist, science fiction writer and leading revolutionary Bolshevik, who had been a co-founder of the Bolsheviks in 1903 and had been one of the party’s chief intellectual spokesmen until Lenin finally succeeded in usurping his leadership position and actually went so far as to expel his rival from the party in 1909.
Malinovskii was born in 1873 in Sokółka in the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire, now in Poland, barely a hundred miles across the same Grodno region from the little hamlet in which Prof. Gorelik would be born half a century later, destined to do more than anyone else in the 20th Century to introduce Malinovskii’s scientific work to the West and to the global scientific community outside the Soviet Union.
Dr Malinovskii wrote under the nom de guerre “Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov” to evade the Czar’s censors, and it was under the name of “Alexander Bogdanov” that he would achieve both political and scientific renown.
As you’ll have gathered, Bogdanov was between 1903 and 1909 Lenin’s chief rival for intellectual leadership of the Bolshevik movement and above all was Lenin’s chief ideological adversary.
Indeed, Bogdanov’s three-volume Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy (1904–1906) formed the principal target of Lenin’s best known philosophical work, Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909), in which Lenin’s risible misunderstanding of the work of the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838–1916) as being a metaphysical idealist further marred an otherwise altogether feeble and somewhat trivial riposte to Bogdanov’s tour de force, riddled with ignoratio elenchi.
Lenin was no match for Bogdanov’s superior intellect, philosophical sophistication, and scientific acumen, and philosophical argument was clearly not one of Lenin’s stronger suits, nor was academic decorum—his disgraceful diatribe against Bogdanov has long remained notorious for its extreme rudeness. However, Lenin’s purpose was purely rhetorical and political rather than genuinely philosophical.
Lenin’s legendary gift for strategic political manoeuvring ultimately managed to win the day over his comparatively liberal ideological rival Bogdanov, who led the more radical, uncompromising Left Bolshevik faction after the failed revolution of 1905, urging armed insurrection at a point in time when Lenin was urging the patient pursuit of legal means of advancing Social Democracy. He therefore saw Bogdanov not only as a threat to his own position of leadership but as threatening to derail the social democratic movement, and Lenin’s attack on Bogdanov’s philosophical work was part of his efforts to discredit him and get him expelled from the Bolsheviks.
Not least in light of Bogdanov’s great personal and professional prestige, and his continuing position of hegemony within the Russian intellectual world at the turn of the 20th Century and for decades after, Lenin, and later Stalin, considered Bogdanov and his radical, contrarian ideas to represent the most serious ideological threat to dialectical materialism, and all the more so after Bogdanov started publishing his magnum opus Tektologia (1912–1928).
After Lenin’s death, the nascent science of Tektology was banned in the Soviet Union under Stalin in 1924 as one of the Russian dictator’s first official acts, at which point Bogdanov’s work was forced to go underground where it remained for over sixty-five years.
In fact, the official Soviet ban on Tektology was not lifted until 1989 as part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost reforms, the same year the Berlin Wall fell, and the year of the Revolution of 1989 which led to the fall of communism across the Eastern Bloc and the triumph of liberal democracy, ultimately spelling the end of the Soviet Union.
All the same, in the meantime, beginning in 1964 and increasing throughout the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, with the establishment of the Section on Theoretical Questions of Organization within the Council for Complex Problems of Cybernetics, Soviet cyberneticians were permitted to pursue a specially tolerated revival of Bogdanov’s work, looking for new ways forward in response to the manifest failure of the economic organization of the U.S.S.R. to deal with the increasingly complex business of administering the Soviet economy.
Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism which had so rattled Lenin between 1904 and 1909 and against which he railed and fulminated at such length, would not be published in a full English-language edition (in three volumes) until 2020.
But forty years earlier, in 1980, Prof. Gorelik had published his influential translation of1 Bogdanov’s far more important and far more radical, ambitious, and groundbreaking work, Essays in Tektology: The Universal Organization Science.
The Essays were first published in Russian in book form in 1921 (having previously been published in instalments in Proletarskaya Kultura Nos. 7-20 between 1919 and 1921), condensing his much larger, three-volume treatise Tektologia, Bogdanov’s magnum opus. English translations of Bogdanov’s prefaces to both the 1912 and 1922 editions of Tektologia are included in Prof. Gorelik’s English edition of Bogdanov’s Essays in Tektology.
A translation of Tektologia had, however, already been published in German, still the universal scientific language at the time, in 1926–28, and it was through its German edition that Bogdanov’s pioneering work on Tektology would exert its seminal, if still under-recognized influence on the development of cybernetics in the West, much as Mach’s influence on quantum physics likewise still remains under-recognized.
It was through my own reading of Prof. Gorelik’s translation of Bogdanov’s Essays on Tektology along with Prof. Gorelik’s many scientific publications on Bogdanov’s Tektology, through scientific seminars with Prof. Gorelik and especially through hours of in-depth discussion (mainly 1984-89) comparing Bogdanov’s theoretical framework to the one that I had by then been developing for over fifteen years, that I learned from Prof. Gorelik that my own scientific and philosophical work was not only fully consonant with Bogdanov’s own, but also not least in terms of a shared, radical new epistemology.
It was from these discussions between myself and Prof. Gorelik that I began to see tremendous further scope for extending my own fast-evolving theoretical departures: beyond their narrower origins in physiology and biology more generally, clinical psychology, institutional and theoretical psychiatry, psychotherapy, social policy, social intervention, semiotics and biosemiotics, cybernetics, and the transformation of organizations, and extending my findings to the understanding of the very nature and dynamics of matter, on the one hand, right through to the transformation of society on the other—the full sweep of which Bogdanov stood, for me, then as now, along with the work of Brunel University’s D. J. Stewart in Ternality Theory, as still a shining exemplar of just how to attempt such a seemingly absurdly audacious enterprise as this.
“Seemingly” because it simply follows from the generality of the theory which applies at every “level” insofar as the theory recognizes no levels. A pattern is a pattern, a context is a context.
But today’s post is not about my own work, nor is it about Prof. Gorelik, or Tektology, or Bogdanov.
Rather, today’s post is about quantum mechanics and its relation to our own radical new view of the universe.
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From Nagarjuna and Wittgenstein to Bateson: the 17th Century View of Reality Unravels
So on that note, as true “contemporaries of the future,” let us turn to the present and future of quantum mechanics, the business at hand.
That is to say, for starters, let us return to the 2nd and 3rd Centuries BCE.
At the tender age of thirteen, following my earliest philosophical interests, I began the serious study of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, including especially the Madhyamaka metaphysics of Nagarjuna (ca. 150–ca. 250 BCE). Wishing to dig deeper and gravitating to the Zen school of Mahayana Buddhism, I soon began the study of Zen practice in earnest under the tutelage of a Japanese Zen Master, a regional bishop in the hierarchy of the Japanese Sōtō Zen school.
At the end of my sophomore year of high school, after some three to four years of Zen practice and study, my Zen master set me the task of researching and writing what turned out to be a hefty scholarly monograph on a topic he very carefully delineated, and on which I worked sedulously throughout my junior year of high school and submitted to my school’s Independent Study program for full course credit (and for which my Zen master generously provided some beautiful decorative Shodō [書道] calligraphy).
A richly illustrated monograph on a very narrow, specialist slice of enduring ideas spanning the entire history of Zen Buddhist and Mahayana metaphysics and soteriology, which had generated themes running throughout a millennium of Chinese and Japanese Zen Buddhist art and legend through which I presented my narrative, the resulting treatise had at its heart the conception of sudden, across-the-board transformation through ordinariness, seeing the world stripped of abstractions and tacit assumptions, and living in this now-transformed world, free of Blake’s “mind-forged manacles.”
This was, in Zen doctrine, the living embodiment of the Prajñāpāramitā Sutra’s equation of emptiness (śūnyatā) and wisdom (prajñā) ingeniously introduced by Nagarjuna in his 2nd and 3rd Century BCE Madhyamaka critique of metaphysics, the core of which can be found in the telegraphic Prajñāpāramitā Hridaya Sutra or “Heart Sutra,” a kind of “cheat sheet” for the Prajñāpāramitā Sutra which every Sōtō Zen student would learn to chant in mediaeval Japanese, and if possible (as I did) to learn it by heart, as well as to learn its translation and deeper meaning both in theory and above all in direct experience in zazen meditation.
Fascinated in that same year by various topics in higher mathematics including above all the transfinite mathematics of Georg Cantor (1845–1918) along with set theory more generally, I dabbled widely in various areas of higher mathematics including number theory, proof theory, and René Thom’s catastrophe theory, and I even briefly dipped my toes into the waters of category theory, in which my high school mathematics teacher was something of an authority.
Burning the midnight oil, the most palpable result of these juvenile efforts were twofold: on the one hand, my invariably oversleeping through my alarm, being late for high school almost every day of the school year, and happily spending time in detention pursuing these selfsame interests. But on the other hand, while I didn’t manage to get very far with these studies given my low boredom threshold, before long they led me straight to something I found far more interesting, namely the work of the pioneering analytical philosophers Gottlob Frege (1848– 1925) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951).
Curiously, at exactly the same time, my reading of contemporary anglophone commentaries in Zen literature and metaphysics—the work of Prof. Paul D. Wienpahl (1916–1980) I remember particularly in this regard—also led me to Wittgenstein’s work from another direction altogether. All roads seemed to lead to Wittgenstein, whose work would occupy much of my time over the succeeding decades.
Between Nagarjuna’s systematic demolition of the notion of enduring physical objects in isolation from their contextual interaction, on the one hand, and Wittgenstein’s parallel demolition job which led me straightaway to the closely related via negativa of the Oxford school of “Ordinary Language Philosophy” whose leading lights throughout the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s and ‘70s were Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) and J. L. Austin (1911–1960) on the other hand, this all meant I was more than ready for the work of Gregory Bateson (1904–1980), to which I was introduced by a history teacher at the start of my senior year of high school.
Not least it meant that I was more than ready to grasp at once Bateson’s radical cybernetic, interactional epistemology and cosmology in which he reconceived the universe as consisting entirely of what he called “news”—differences making a difference to someone or something in a world of pure information, differences on the move in a universe in which all was in unceasing, purely semiotic interaction and in which context was everything.
Meanwhile, before finding in Wittgenstein and Bateson some of the clues I’d been seeking, I had set myself the problem of whether it was possible to identify, in any complex system, the shortest route from one defined stable state of the system to another defined stable state.
Even more to the point, in the summer vacation between my sophomore and junior year of high school, while I was struggling with questions of Zen soteriology and was first encountering Wittgenstein, I was obsessed with whether it would be possible to identify, predictably, the smallest intervention that would trigger an all-or-none flip from any existing state of a system to some specific desired state and no other, all at once, with nothing in between, and with absolute precision.
My youthful dream was one day to arrive at a comprehensive scientific theory of such purposeful, all-or-none, systemic transformations across the board, along with a practical methodology for identifying the smallest intervention into any system that would flip it immediately from the existing state to the desired state in one hit. This was to become my life’s work in Metamorphology and Minimalist Intervention.
But again, today’s post is not at all about my own philosophical and scientific work, nor is it about Minimalist Intervention, nor even about the seminal influence on all of this of Bateson, Ryle or Wittgenstein.
Nor is it a post about Bogdanov or Nagarjuna, though they do come into the story as key characters.
Today’s post, as I said above, is really just about quantum physics.
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A Precious Gem I Found on the Beach
In fact, I had for many decades quite forgotten all about my ever having delved into Nagarjuna back when I was still knee-high to a hubcap, and I’d never stopped for long to wonder about whether my thinking had been influenced by Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka metaphysics. And I had also all but forgotten about how very influential Bogdanov had been in the development of my life’s work on change, until I unexpectedly ran into both of those guys on the beach last week.
Fifteen years after writing “Philosophy of a Leaf” (as described in “On Becoming a Contemporary of the Future”) I returned for the first time to the South Shore of Bermuda.
I had just published “The Renaissance of the Universe," offering a sweeping panorama of the universe as it unexpectedly appeared, almost as an afterthought of the remarkable scientific achievements wrought by the forgotten 20th Century revolution in ideas I had described in my previous post to that one, “Catching Up with the Past.
I was acutely conscious, as I went off on last week’s much-needed vacation, of having rashly promised in my closing remarks that this next time (today’s post) as well as describing some of the even more radically altered views of the universe opened up by this scientific revolution, I would also have something to say about how much more radical these new conceptions of nature were than even the most startling reconceptualizations emerging from the findings of quantum mechanics in the first three decades of the 20th Century.
I say “rashly promised” and “acutely conscious” of having made this promise, because I realized that I had last delved into the topic of quantum mechanics some 35 years ago (1988) and I felt I owed it to you, my readers, to try and bring myself up to date.
Accordingly, I sought out the latest synoptic account I could find on the state of the art in quantum mechanics, and as my reading for the beach I brought along Helgoland2 by the distinguished Italian quantum physicist Prof. Carlo Rovelli.
I devoured Helgoland cover to cover on the first two days of my holiday, cheering all the way through every word and every footnote, hardly distracted by the exquisite turquoise waters and pink sands that formed the backdrop to this exhilarating read. What a delight it was to have at last discovered the work of the incomparable Carlo Rovelli, a kindred spirit if I have ever encountered one.
Helgoland, readily accessible to the lay reader, I found entertaining, lyrical, incisively argued, witty, enlightening and profound—a book I found impossible to put down as the author takes us on a whirlwind tour of the first century of quantum mechanics, and all the pros and cons of the various interpretations of quantum mechanics battling for supremacy over the course of the past hundred years. And for me personally, Rovelli’s book was also a kind of vindication.
When, after some 23 years of research, I finally submitted my doctoral dissertation on Minimalist Intervention in 1994, I had been full of trepidation, particularly regarding my audacious step of extending my findings, in an admittedly, explicitly more speculative chapter, to a realm in which I, as a physiologist, cybernetician, biosemiotician, psychologist, and analytic philosopher, was a complete layman: subatomic physics, a topic about which I knew even less by then than the little I had known in high school.
I was all but convinced that my doctoral examiners would require me to take that chapter out—my second doctoral supervisor, Dr Mike Elstob, present at the oral examination of my dissertation as an amicus curiae, was a physicist by training as well as a cybernetician, and this crazy chapter was the first he’d seen of my leap of faith into the interior of the atom. But to my astonishment, the examiners let it stand and my thesis was accepted without revisions.
These more speculative ideas I had first developed, by way of an extension of my core theoretical framework back in 1988 when, just for fun, I offered my doctoral supervisor a casual proof of why it is not only extremely difficult to predict the weather but may even in principle be impossible. My arguments had nothing to do with non-linear systems, chaos theory or complexity theory, and nothing to do with what little I understood of quantum mechanics, but they had everything to do with the contemporary interpretation of quantum mechanics that I first encountered in Rovelli’s book last week along with the concepts and the arguments he put forward.
In my 1994 dissertation, six years after my “weather-proofing,” I would be arguing and demonstrating in detail, beginning with my central chapter on the nature of observation, the necessity of introducing such notions as point-of-view, description, context, interaction, vantage point, selection, value, and purpose into the fundamental mechanics of the universe, every bit as important as matter and energy to the functioning of everything in nature, not just in the organic realm where this was easy for me to prove scientifically beyond any shadow of a doubt, but even (more speculatively) in the inorganic realm.
And now, here on the beach in Bermuda nearly thirty years later, I held in my hand Carlo Rovelli’s masterpiece-in-minature, Helgoland, my favourite ever monograph on physics, let alone on quantum mechanics in particular, which provided more than ample vindication. Coming from a somewhat different angle, Rovelli had arrived, as an outstanding, pioneer physicist in quantum mechanics, at almost identical conclusions and deploying a not dissimilar set of arguments.
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Bogdanov and Nagarjuna to the Rescue (with a little help from Wittgenstein and a frog)
I say “somewhat different” angle, because while I am merely a very occasional, passing tourist in the world of quantum physics, a stranger in a strange land where Prof. Rovelli has not only long made his home year-round but is very much a pillar of the quantum physics community, nonetheless it turned out to my even greater astonishment and delight that he and I both shared at least some of the same sources of inspiration for our respective, complementary conceptual departures, including two rather surprising ones—surprising because they are so rarely cited nowadays, in the West at least, in a purely scientific context: Nagarjuna and Bogdanov, of all people!
Prof. Rovelli in fact singles out these two seminal influences on his work, Nagarjuna and Bogdanov, as together coming to the rescue in enabling him to resolve the various antinomies thrown up by all prior contending interpretations of quantum mechanics, and enabling him to arrive at last at his influential, state-of-the-art “relational interpretation” of quantum mechanics.
Sweeter still, Rovelli in his book makes a nod or two to Wittgenstein and also to the work in neuroscience that had played such a key role in the early development of my own work, first as a neurophysiologist at Oxford and later as a cybernetician at Brunel: the work going back above all to the two Wittgensteinian cyberneticians and neuroscientists, the late great Horace Barlow (1921–2020) (along with Barlow’s two Nobel Prize laureate students David H. Hubel, FRS (1926-2013) and Torsten Wiesel (1924–)), and Donald M. MacKay (1922–1987), together with the whole vast and growing body of work (going back at least to the pair of classic 1959 papers by the cybernetician Oliver Selfridge (1926–2008) on “Pandemonium” and Lettvin, Maturana, McCulloch and Pitts on “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain,” to which we have referred in some detail previously) showing that the majority of signals between eye and brain don’t travel from the eyes to the brain but from the brain to the eyes (Rovelli, p. 141).
What happens is that the brain expects to see something, on the basis of what it knows and has previously occurred. The brain elaborates an image of what it predicts the eyes should see.
This information is conveyed from the brain to the eyes, through intermediate stages. If a discrepancy is revealed between what the brain expects and the light arriving into the eyes, only then do the neural circuits send signals towards the brain. So images from around us do not travel from the eyes to the brain—only news of discrepancies regarding what the brain expects do.
The discovery that sight functions in this way came as a surprise. But if we think about it, it becomes clear that this is the most efficient way of retrieving information from the surroundings. What would be the point of sending towards the brain signals that do nothing but confirm what it already knows? …
The implications for the relationship between what we see and the world, however, are remarkable. When we look around ourselves, we are not truly observing we are instead dreaming an image of the world based on what we know (including bias and misconception) and unconsciously scrutinizing the world to reveal any discrepancies which, if necessary, we will try to correct. (Rovelli, p. 162)
I had thought back in the 1980s and early ‘90s that I was going way out on a limb in extending my scientific findings from the organic to the inorganic realm, but I had plenty of helpers to hand from amongst the partisans of the revolution in ideas on which my life’s work had been founded since my school days.
Wittgenstein was one of these. Bogdanov I did not discover and adopt as my guide through these little explored regions until 1984, but who did much to give me the courage of my convictions. Nagarjuna’s much earlier influence I had forgotten about entirely, but, thinking about it now and reading Rovelli’s account, it’s hard to imagine that Nagarjuna didn’t help pave the way for my gravitating so easily to Bateson’s radical view of a purely contextual, semiotic, interactional universe.
Reading Helgoland, there seemed to be no points of fundamental disagreement between myself and Rovelli, and it was breathtaking to see how far quantum mechanics has advanced in the last 35 years, at last making sense of, and taking to their logical conclusions, as Rovelli demonstrates so well, the findings of Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, Jordan, Born and the under-appreciated Mach, opening up stunning new vistas I had only ever glimpsed from afar or merely speculated that they must be there.
Rovelli writes:
Quantum theory has clarified the foundations of chemistry, the functioning of atoms, of solids, of plasmas, of the colour of the sky, the dynamics of the stars, the origins of galaxies … a thousand aspects of the world. It forms the basis of our latest technologies: from computers to nuclear power. Engineers, astrophysicists, cosmologists, chemists and biologists all use it daily; the rudiments of the theory are included in high-school curricula. It has never been wrong. It is the beating heart of today's science. Yet it remains profoundly mysterious, subtly disturbing. (p. 2)
And again:
Quantum theory has been applied to atoms, atomic nuclei, elementary particles, the physics of chemical bonds, the physics of solid materials, of liquid and gas, semiconductors, lasers, the physics of stars such as the Sun, neutron stars, the primordial universe, the physics of the formation of galaxies ... and so on and so forth. The list could go on for pages. Quantum theory has allowed us to understand whole areas of nature, from the form of the periodic table of elements to medical applications that have saved millions of lives. It has predicted new phenomena never previously imagined: quantum correlations over a distance of kilometres, quantum computers, teleportation ... all predictions have turned out to be correct.
The astonishing run of quantum theory’s successes has been uninterrupted for a century, and it continues today.
The calculation scheme by Heisenberg, Born, Jordan and Dirac, the strange idea of limiting yourself to only what’s observable, and to substituting physical variables with matrices, has never yet been wrong. It is the only fundamental theory about the world that until now has never been found wrong—and which we still do not know the limits of. (p. 19)
Until now, however, as he points out, the antinomies and wildly improbable conclusions regarding the nature of reality thrown up by attempts to interpret the otherwise inconceivable findings of quantum mechanics over the past century have proved intractable.
We know the theory works, the observations are undeniable and the mathematics flawless; it can predict impossibly precise quantities to the umpteenth decimal place. Yet every interpretation attempted over the past century to explain the paradoxical observations made and repeatedly confirmed in work on quantum mechanics have defied all common sense, to put it mildly. They have been absolutely nuts.
But the modern, relational interpretation of quantum mechanics at last manages to make sense of the findings without resorting to absurd hypotheses, such as an infinity of new parallel universes, equally real, being generated every moment. The relational interpretation seems at last to work without generating new paradoxes or appealing to arbitrary hypotheses of unobservable entities in a manner that one leading scientist of my acquaintance once derided as “no better than witchcraft.”
If you want to know what an “E2” (new-episemology) physics looks like, you need look no further than the work of Prof. Carlo Rovelli, whose thought I look forward to delving more deeply into over the coming years. Meanwhile, I cannot recommend Helgoland highly enough.
Having now regained the courage of my convictions, thanks to his book and getting up to date with the most important conceptual advances in the understanding of quantum mechanics, I will make good on my rash promise to say something about how the startling new picture of the universe revealed by the partisans of the 20th Century scientific revolution went even further than the already stunning revision of our view of nature brought to light by the discoveries in quantum physics during the first three decades of the 20th Century.
I can best do this by attempting to offer a crude synopsis of Carlo Rovelli’s quantum physics view of the nature of reality, which could not have been arrived at without making, either independently or under their influence, much the same conceptual innovations made by the partisans of the revolution in ideas providing the foundations of our own work.
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Quantum Physics Today: the State-of-the-Art Physicists’ View on the Fabric of Reality
After considering and critiquing the various contending alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics that have been put forward over the past hundred years or so, Rovelli, in Helgoland, puts forward his own “relational interpretation,” in which quantum physics is conceived as a theory of information that systems have about one another, and in which the properties of any object in the universe is thought of in terms of the information that one object has about another object. (pp. 91-2)
Rovelli endorses Mach’s attack on 18th Century mechanism’s unjustified metaphysical assumptions in which nature is conceived of purely in terms of matter on the move, a notion which has outlived its usefulness and turned into a metaphysical prejudice from which science must be freed, basing knowledge, as both Mach and Heisenberg urged, only upon what is observable.
We can no longer assume that the world is deterministic, with the past, present and future causally linked in some way, he argues. Instead “we need to adapt our philosophy to our science, and not our science to our philosophy.” (Pp. 105, 117-118)
In the new view of relational quantum mechanics, the properties of objects cannot even in principle be separated from the objects interacting with them. Absent such interaction, there would be no properties. The central aspect of quantum physics he calls “contextuality”: things exist in a context.
An isolated object, taken in itself, independent of every interaction, has no particular state. At most we can attribute to it a kind of probabilistic disposition to manifest itself in one way or another. But even this is only an anticipation of future phenomena, a reflection of phenomena past, and only and always relative to another object.
The conclusion is revolutionary. It leaps beyond the idea that the world is made up of a substance that has attributes and forces us to think about everything in terms of relations.
The discovery of the quantum properties of the world is the discovery that physical matter is not capable of fulfilling this role. Fundamental physics does provide an elementary and universal grammar for understanding phenomena, but not a grammar consisting of simple matter in motion, with its own primary properties. The contextuality that permeates the world reaches this elementary grammar. There are no elementary entities that we can describe except in the context of their interaction with something else. (pp. 108, 124)
What he calls “the fine grain of the world,” on this view, is not made up of particles having mass and motion, but is better described in terms of relations, where no intrinsic properties of anything exist. The description of the world purely in terms of relative variables and their correlations dissolves the bifurcation between the mental and the physical, both being understood as products of interactions.
Central too to the new quantum mechanics is the relative information (in our terms, the redundancy) “generated by the interactions that weave the world.” (p. 141)
For quantum physics, the physical world is no more than a web of correlations: relative information, redundancy, patterning in context.
Meaning and intentionality are only particular cases of the ubiquity of correlations. There is a continuity between the world of meanings in our mental life and the physical world. Both are relations. The distance between the way we think about the physical world and the way we think about our mental world diminishes,
“and [our] knowledge of the world is nothing else than an example of the result of interactions that generate meaningful information.” (Pp. 147-48)
For Rovelli, the world is the reciprocal reflection of internal perspectives on the world, which are always partial and reflect one another, what we have ourselves long described borrowing Eddington’s phrase, “a symposium of points of view,” (P. 152), Rovelli’s account eerily resembling the way in which my speculative “physics” chapter in my doctoral dissertation adapted Leibniz’s windowless monads to show how this would work in practice.
Like us, for Rovelli and the relational quantum physicists, “Reality is not divided into levels. The levels into which we break it down, the objects into which it appears to be divided, are the ways in which nature relates to us, in dynamical configurations of physical events in our brain that we call concepts. The separation of reality into levels is relative to our way of being in interaction with it.” Fundamental physics offers no foundation. While nature follows simple rules,
the complexity of things often renders the general laws irrelevant to us. … There is an autonomy and independence of levels of understanding of the world that justifies the autonomy of the different areas of knowledge. In this sense, elementary physics is much less useful than physicists would like to think. (p. 156)
On this view, according to Rovelli’s interpretation of quantum physics, what we think of as entities are no more than ephemeral nodes in the web of interactions woven by events as they unfold, and their properties exist only in relation to something else and are not determined until the moment of these interactions, everything being what we think of it as being only with respect to something else, and every possible view of anything can only ever be partial and dependent on point of view.
“And yet, points of view communicate, knowledge is in dialogue with itself and with reality. In the dialogue those points of view modify, enrich, converge—and our understanding of reality deepens,” a reality characterized by the unceasing, contextual interaction between and the interconnectedness of all things. (Pp. 166-68)
Like the partisans of the revolution in ideas, the new, relational quantum physics incorporates the observer inextricably into the fabric of reality. This is all a far cry, as Rovelli demonstrates in detail, from the quantum physics of the first three decades of the 20th Century.
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Taking Things Further Without Going Too Far
In many respects the radical new view of the nature of the universe opened up by the scientific revolution we have been surveying in the pages of Change (summarized in "Catching Up with the Past” and “The Renaissance of the Universe”) still went considerably further even than contemporary quantum physics has yet revealed, and yes, even further than in Prof. Rovelli’s account, thanks to additional fundamental discoveries about the nature of Nature.
Early on in his book, Rovelli refers to the likely possibility that fundamental new physical principles may yet be discovered which will change everything, and what I have in mind is one of those.
These were discoveries beyond what even Bogdanov was able to conceive, as he died the year after the key initial discovery was made but seven years before it was published, many years before it had become widely known, and decades before its significance for understanding the functioning of everything in nature was properly appreciated by the scientific community.
According to the widely accepted creation myth at least, as related in later interviews by its discoverer, it was on August 6th, 1927, around 8.00 in the morning that Harry S. Black, on the deck of the Lackawanna Ferry on his daily commute from Hoboken, New Jersey across to the old Bell Labs facility in West Street, Manhattan, had an epiphany which was destined to change our view of reality forever.
This discovery turned out to reveal the precise mechanism by which the functioning of the behaviour of all living things and indeed of all organic tissue at all levels down to the most microscopic subcellular processes, consisted of taking a selected environmental variable and extracting it from the causal nexus, as we discussed in greater detail in Catching Up with the Past.
Decades of work followed, reaching its climax in the remarkable theoretical and experimental work of Bill Powers and his colleagues, work for which Powers ought in my view and in the view of many other scientists to have been awarded a Nobel Prize, demonstrating to the Nth decimal place the autonomy of living systems along with the precise physical mechanisms by which the organic realm manages to extract itself from its physical and chemical substrate. Parallel work by a host of others, mainly between 1910 and 2010, and mostly in the biological sciences, combined to extend this remarkable work in multiple directions.
In any event, when I mapped out last time in “Renaissance of the Universe” how this now rather neglected scientific revolution altered our whole view of the fabric of reality, I was mainly quoting verbatim from a set of detailed notes I had made on the 2nd of October 1996 and wrote up in more detail on the 28th and 29th of October 1996 under that selfsame heading, “The Renaissance of the Universe.”
It is in my view significant, and may be helpful for the reader to know, that these remarks were recorded as I spent the day walking around the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, looking at the magnificent displays of the most diverse botanical specimens with new eyes, that is from the point of view of the new epistemology. It was biology I had on my mind as I wrote, not physics.
However, I redacted some of that detailed account last time for fear of “going too far” or making a fool of myself. But having learned last week on the beach from Prof. Rovelli’s book that these views of ours, however far out on a limb they may have been for eighty years, are now well on their way to sitting on the frontiers at least of the new scientific mainstream, at least among a growing community of physicists, I decided it was high time I let these remarks see the light of day after a delay of nearly 27 years! So here goes.
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Reality is decidedly not how it is described by classical physics.
This was an abrupt awakening from the pleasant sleep in which we had been cradled by the illusions of Newton’s success. But it was a reawakening that connects us back to the beating heart of scientific thinking, which is not made up of acquired certainties: it is thinking constantly in motion, the power of which is precisely the capacity to always question everything and begin over again, to be fearless of subverting the order of the world in the search for a more efficient one, only to then put a further question mark over everything, to subvert it all over again.
—Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland
Back to Nature
Contrary to what we have called “the Administrative Fallacy,” Nature is miscellaneous. It is not divided up into fixed classes or kinds.
The universe is characterized by miscellaneousness, by a multiplicity of independent, interpenetrating realities, a symposium (cf. Eddington) of diverse and unrelated points of view, and so is characterized by irrelevance—of everything to everything else. The stories do not fit together into a single narrative, for they are all irrelevant to one another in content, characters, theme and style.
Nature is as much (or rather, infinitely more) pervaded by ubiquitous quality than by the far rarer and more inconsequential quantity. The universe is full of rich colour, in an infinity of different dimensions. Nature, even so-called inorganic Nature, is pervaded, moved by vitality. The universe is everywhere and in every way alive. Non-determinism is of the essence of all that is. Nothing is caused by anything else, at least not even in the Humean sense of causality by which we have been hamstrung for over 200 years.
As I said last week, “Within the organic realm at least, everything is characterized by purposefulness, complete autonomy, and by irrepressible spontaneity. The spontaneity, freedom, and voluntariness of all living things at all levels down to the tiniest organelle means that events in Nature can be conceived of as instances of improvisation, not the following of a script or score that existed prior to the event.” But more than this: Nature is accordingly found to be characterized by extreme variability and capriciousness, and often, from one point of view or another, displays out and out perversity, bloody-mindedness.
Every natural event is tantamount to a creative act. Above all perhaps, the actual universe is characterized and moved by design, though on this understanding there need be no “Designer” overall. Descriptiveness and abstraction are built into the very nature of things. The universe is pervaded by value, preferences, directionality, “imparities on the move” in D. J. Stewart’s terms.
Mind, intentionality, and consciousness are all present and operative in all living things, all events, though in varying combinations and to varying degrees. Although this is entirely unnecessary as an assumption, as Rovelli points out, in order to make sense of quantum mechanics from a relational perspective in terms of context and interactions, I would still assert that the balance of the evidence from the biological domain at least leans heavily in support of the hypothesis of the fundamental identity of life and mind, and not least in view of the account of consciousness that I have been teaching at Oxford for more than two decades now.
The universe is a thing of passion as well as action, but passion not in the sense of “being acted upon” but in the active sense of passion in terms of responsive, emotional involvement—Nature is engagé, passionately committed, driven from within.
In this actual universe, all is in flux. There are no causes preceding their putative effects, no natural law, no natural order. Regularity is the exception while anarchy reigns—small islands of pattern in a sea of random variance. Nature is inherently unpredictable. Nothing is ever repeated. Nature does not follow a career but meanders where it will.
We said last time that, “Such order as can be found amidst the prevailing disorder arises not from causes or according to laws, but by design—specifically, out of the design constraints of the multifarious players,” but I had originally added to that sentence back in 1996, and still hold to it now, “as it were the interested parties.”
Alluding to my more speculative chapter in my doctorate where I extended my analysis where angels fear to tread, I wrote in 1996: “Even the electron has its agenda that it seeks to pursue. There is free will throughout—even for the electron—whenever there is purpose (and in this world, that is simply everywhere) there is choice, selection according to criteria, and perfect freedom.”
And so this is a universe pervaded by value, shaped by individual values of individual players, ruled by contingency and governed by purpose and design.
There is no mind separate from matter, no matter separate from mind. Matter is no less an abstraction than mind, and mind is no less palpable than matter. There is an essential identity and non-priority of doing and being. Nature is without process, only drama. This is a dramaturgical universe, and God not a demiurge but a dramaturge.
There are an infinity of essences, and intelligent, effective action depends upon respecting these idiosyncratic essences, and as Lichtenberg says (in aphorism F. 32): “the first rule . . . is to regard the various characters as though they were pieces in a game of chess and not seek to win one’s game by changing the laws that govern these pieces—not move a knight like a pawn, etc. Secondly, to define these characters exactly and not render them inactive in order to reach one’s final goal but rather to win by allowing them to be what they are. To do otherwise really means wanting to work miracles, which are always unnatural.”
Everything in Nature acts according to its own whims, within the constraints arising from the whimsical engagements of others.
Accordingly, every event in Nature is context-specific and at the same time context-generating.
In Nature, everything is relative to point of view.
The so-called “laws of nature” would appear to be an exception here as they would appear to be invariant; but in the first place, such sweeping invariances are so rare as to be statable in a few laws which are fairly inconsequential in the scheme of things, and secondly, in operation even these laws will influence what transpires in different ways according to the point of view of the actors. “Life is like a mirror—what you see reflected in it depends on where you are standing.”
Our account of Nature agrees with Eddington’s or at least with one (arguably merely verbally coinciding) point—Nature is a symposium of points of view. In one sense Nature comprises as many different universes as there are points of view (and these are infinite)—a “multiverse” indeed.
Nothing in our experience can be outside Nature. There is nothing metaphysically artificial—everything is natural.
Qualities are real, and the universe is full of colour and harmonies beyond our wildest imaginings, though we can only ever be aware of a small selection of these—“a portion of the spectrum” and only certain spectra.
Nature is full of surprises, richly communicative and intercommunicative, and powerfully emotional.
Nature is alive in every part, striving, striving in every fibre, self-crafting and self-creating. (It is through such ceaseless self-creation of Nature that God creates the universe—the best of all possible worlds.)
We cannot begin to understand Nature without understanding what it is that whatever we find in it is for—what function it fulfils, not in general but from a particular point of view (e.g. organisms as machines for ensuring the continuation of a particular piece of genetic code, in Dawkins’s account; a chicken as an egg’s way of making another egg, in the old saw).
Where last time we wrote, “Nature is infinitely diverse, a diversity that can never be catalogued because it is non-denumerably infinite—an infinity of interpenetrating infinitely diverse realities,” back in 1996 in Kew Gardens I had originally added, much in a Rovelli-like spirit, as it turns out: “Nature is magical: richer in qualities than any observer—or even class of observers (e.g. humans)—can possibly imagine.”
There is no emergence in Nature because there are no levels and so nothing to emerge from.
Qualities are irrelevant to one another. Why should we say that the phenomena of biology emerge from those of physics rather than saying that the phenomena of physics are degenerate biological phenomena? Or less facetiously, we must say that they are just different aspects of Nature as experienced, answers to different questions which are, at bottom, irrelevant to one another.
Nature is a broad church. “My Father’s house has many mansions.” There are an infinite multiplicity of independent realities (answering to different sets of questions), arrayed non-hierarchically.
Nothing is hidden. Nature is here (everywhere right around you, here in the study or atelier or garden or restaurant) not there (through a telescope, under a microscope). The occultism of the Official view is transcended.
Nature is aesthetic. “The aesthetic universe.” The universe is no more mathematical than it is poetical, or rather, no less poetical than it is mathematical. (God as a poet and mathematician—a “Renaissance Man”.)
Directionality in the universe is molecular, even molar, not atomic; top-down, not bottom-up. The whole determines the functioning of the parts and not the other way around.
Design is both immanent and transcendent in Nature. In the realm of design, transcendence equals immanence. If we take on board the notion of design in Nature we can dispense altogether with the concepts of immanence and transcendence in cosmology.
There is no winding-down of the universe (cf. Haldane, Toulmin, etc.) but although our universe is not threatened by decay it is indeed threatened by decadence. It is subject to threat from within—the undoing of the universe, should it come to pass, will be not entropy but bad metaphysics (viz. materialism, mechanism).
Nature, whilst not hierarchical, is nevertheless characterized by degrees of perfection. Man is the highest realization of Nature. But if Man should fall into decadence and our humanistic civilization into desuetude, if we should come to believe the materialistic, mechanistic fairy story we shall become less human than we are, degenerate to a less evolved state, and the universe as a whole will begin winding down. Its fate is in our hands.
The actual universe is observable—look and see!—if your eyes are not powerful enough then assist them with a microscope or telescope and see some of the finer detail you had not previously observed.
I have no quarrel with the physicists, only with the metaphysics we have made of their method (Burtt). The Official universe is at war with our Actual world. The success of one will be the disappearance of the other, not in the realm of ideas merely, but in actuality.
That last paragraph (like all the paragraphs above it in this section), was written 27 years ago at Kew Gardens, quoting a book by E. A. Burtt written in 1927; but as it turns out, and as I learned last week on the beach reading Prof. Rovelli’s Helgoland, we are not at odds with the physicists any longer, but seem to be in almost complete agreement. Physics has at last caught up with biology and cybernetics.
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A Science of the Singular
In light of our new view of nature, which we prefer to call the “interactional view” rather than the “relational view,” and hence in light of the correspondingly expanded view of science and its even more open-ended, vast scope and possibilities for extending human knowledge, where does this leave us?
We have remarked in earlier posts that the new scientific epistemology opens up radical new possibilities for applying scientific knowledge to one-off situations, including above all, problematic situations in the world of affairs.
But how can the gap be bridged between the powerful, high-level abstractions of science, on the one hand, and the complex details of everyday situations where fine judgement and decisive action are required?
Instead of seeking to construct ad hoc analogical models of complex practical situations, we sought instead to develop ways to filter the complexity out of the equation in a non-reductionistic way.
Rather than following the lead of the so-called systems sciences or social sciences which keep reality at a distance by working with the surrogate reality afforded by maps and models and mid-level abstractions, we followed the lead of the natural sciences by “working directly with pieces of the real world in a close and delicate manner.”3
As Nobel physicist Sir George Thomson once remarked, while scientific principles tell us that certain kinds of things cannot be done, and “though they do not say that everything else can (for that would mean that there are no more such principles to discover), it is surprising how quickly the most difficult and intricate developments get made when no principle interferes.”
This essentially negative character of scientific thinking and scientific advance has been recognized from the very beginning of science—it has been a central theme running throughout Bacon's foundational work four centuries ago. In the new epistemology, we take as a fundamental assumption that, all things being equal, only random flux is to be expected anywhere in the universe.
The persistence of any description over time, that is, any enduring pattern or regularity, therefore presupposes mechanism—constraint (“a principle of impossibility”). The laws of nature are themselves such principles, applying more or less universally to whole classes of phenomena.
But even in local, one-off situations, more idiosyncratic constraints can invariably be found which are nonetheless empirically and logically demonstrable.
For example, while the constraint embodied in a well-known law of nature keeps me from getting to Birmingham faster than the speed of light, the cancelled 6:17 constrains me from getting there before “nine o’clock at the earliest” if no other suitable mode of transport is available.
The real-life practical implications of this, here and now, are even more mind-blowing than the radical new picture emerging of the functioning of everything in nature. To these practical implications we must return in a later post, or else I’ll never get this one finished and out the door today!
Stay tuned.
©Copyright 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
George Gorelik, ed. and trans., Essays in Tektology, Systems Inquiry Series, Seaside, CA: Intersystems Publications, 1980
London: Allen Lane, 2021
Dr D. J. Stewart, pers. comm. ca. 1989